The acclaimed bestseller that's teaching the world about the power of mass collaboration.

Translated into more than twenty languages and named one of the best business books of the year by reviewers around the world, Wikinomics has become essential reading for business people everywhere. It explains how mass collaboration is happening not just at Web sites like Wikipedia and YouTube, but at traditional companies that have embraced technology to breathe new life into their enterprises.

This national bestseller reveals the nuances that drive wikinomics, and share fascinating stories of how masses of people (both paid and volunteer) are now creating TV news stories, sequencing the human gnome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding cures for diseases, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, and even building motorcycles.

Descrizione prodotto

L'autore

Don Tapscott and David Ticoll co-founded the business research and consulting firm Digital 4Sight in 1994. They have written for publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, The Globe and Mail and Forbes and appeared on national broadcast media around the world. Both live in Toronto.

That the nature of work, collaboration, and other economic activities is changing very rapidly these days is indisputable. However, it is not immediately clear to everyone what are the forces that are driving this change and what sorts of effects it may have. This book tries to answer these and many other questions in the realm of how the latest advances in various information tools are enabling the radical shift in collaborative production. It is a very readable book aimed at the general audience. The fact that it doesn't delve too deeply into the technical details (like the "Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More") may be a plus, as this way it may be more suitable to appeal to the wider readership base. Overall, it is an interesting read if you are not familiar with the general trends in open and collaborative economy.

Le recensioni clienti più utili su Amazon.com

Amazon.com:
3,8 su 5 stelle
148 recensioni

5 persone l'hanno trovato utile.

3,0 su 5 stelleThe community is the company

DaA.G. Westil 2 settembre 2007 - Pubblicato su Amazon.com

Acquisto verificato

Wikinomics is about opening your company to the world where communities come together, individuals share ideas, intelligence, peer produce, innovate; the communities are driven primarily by self-motivation or respect from peers. The idea is awesome; the authors are right that this is a new era; some of the most successful companies in the world use wikinomics; the most successful Internet companies are based upon it. The companies cost is dramatically cut, they become trustworthy, and individuals create what they want.

But the book is almost irritating to read. They paint a world where wikinomics is practically perfect, where the communities created by the company are utopian, and the companies who refuse the wikinomic ideology as evil. According to the authors, the companies that don't jump on the bandwagon will ultimately fail because they can't compete with speed and innovation that wikinomic companies can produce (compare wikipedia with any encyclopedia).

The reality is the communities created are often not egalitarian. Digg is a good example -- the community is driven by a faction of a top 100 users who control the front page content, any article or comment outside the digg mindset is quickly buried, and websites have been created where you can pay to get dugg.

In addition, the book ignores wikinomic companies who have failed completely or to a large extent (amapedia, a million penguins, la times wiki editorial, the thousands of 2.0 clones) and they give the reader no idea how to start a successful web 2.0 company. The book is also too long and each chapter adds little to the last. The entire book is read in the first chapter.

While I feel companies opening up to the world is an awesome concept and many of the ideas in the book are right, I would have preferred a more balanced book which makes this book unsatisfying. In the end, I still question whether wikinomics is just a bubble going to burst.

This is an important book that talks about the potential that global webs of collaboration, global platforms, and global manufacturing plant forms have to unleash creativity and profit.

Here are the pluses and minuses.

The Minuses:

First, the book is too long. A good technical editor could easily pare 1/3 out, and the authors would still make the same point.

Second, somewhere along the line Penguin abandoned most uses of the comma. You can see it in most of their recent books, and this is a problem. It makes sentence mechanics less precise and sentences much harder to read. Again, a technical editor could go through this book and make it more readable.

Third, some sections are unnecessarily dense. Some of the nomanilized verbs (ex. verbs turned into nouns using "tion") are priceless. I have no doubt they will end up in the Hall of Fame at the Society for Technical Communication.

Fourth, some sections repeat earlier material ad nauseum.

Fifth, the authors bury each chapter thesis at the end of the chapter. If you are writing technical text, please do not do this. Tell me your thesis up front. Then, I may decide whether or not I want to wade through your following arguments. Imagine how much easier would our reading lives be if everybody built written arguments like this.

The Pluses:

The authors present important thinking on the present transformation of business through interactive communication. People working without global barriers may lead to positive economies of scale, with high levels of creativity never seen before.

The Bottom Line:

Read this book. Despite its density, the points are important. You can knock out the book in a few weeks of casual reading. Yes it is dense, and some sections simply restate earlier material to death, but this may be because we now live in uncharted waters. Maybe some points bear repeating.

My biggest concern is this book does not present a balanced picture. It talks only in glowing, positive terms about the reality of webs of collaboration. It never addresses the negative externalities that result. And as the late neo-Luddite Neil Postman wrote, every new technology solves old problems while creating new problems. What new problems will result from all this technology based collaboration?

For example, were all module suppliers for the Boeing 787 able to deliver on their contracts, especially in the wake of our current global economic recession-depression?

Who bears the costs of negative externalities? For example, how much pollution do Boeing's suppliers create when shipping modules from Australia or Japan to Washington state? Who pays these costs? How much fuel is burned up moving modules from one place to another? Wouldn't it be less polluting and more efficient for these companies to build plants in Washington state?

What are the negative effects of such profound economies of scale (EOS) during economic downturns, like now? We saw similar EOS almost wipe out whole industries. Herbert Spencer, the early sociologist, would tell us to ignore it, that it's a cycle of nature that leads to stronger human institutions. Maybe so. But, it also can and does lead to real human suffering. I don't know about others, but I do not feel consoled by being able to Facebook or Twitter about environmental and human devastation wrought by global EOS.

Finally, what is the potential for one supplier in a chain of modules to hold out for ransom before delivery? With such a duck soup of global contractual law, I think a very real potential exists for this. It's not like you can run down to the Home Depot or the next competitor to replace the module. Remember, as Tapscott and Williams write that suppliers continually re-engineer the modules. A sponsoring company like Boeing may hold no proprietary rights, or may not have the core information that lets it re-create the module.

This is all dicey to say the lest; yet, none of it is remotely approached in the first edition of the book. If not in the second edition, the third edition must also contain critiques or, minimally, questions about the potential negatives.

Surprisingly this book is very appropriate for today's large enterprises that would like to get some fresh, new innovative ideas from large workforces--including government agencies. Crowd-sourcing for ideas has become more usual, with better and easier to use software. When the book first came out it seemed far-fetched, but other than a few "out-of-date" descriptions of "new" IT, the concepts described and group models mentioned are very much needed today and would work better, if anything, than several years ago.

Here is the mass collaboration framework presented by Wikinomics in a nutshell:- Generate revenue from support, training, and consulting on a limited set of dimensions of value that matter most to customers- Determine how participants will capture value (monetary or non-monetary value) for their contribution --> Non monetary sources include prestige & social belonging --> Allow others to extend and add services- Assume everything digital is free and replicable- Outsource everything non-strategic- Interoperate with other open systems (in both directions)- Successful communities require: --> A core group to guide, integrate, and manage exceptions to processes --> Mechanisms for quality control --> Self selecting and self replenishing --> Constant communication --> Systems that are modular, reconfigurable, and editable

Though I summarize the books I read, I always recommend that folks buy the book for themselves to get the full benefit and to support the author's endeavors. As other reviewers have noted, this is slow and sometimes repetitive read. However, when you step back from it, you observe a nice framework for applying mass collaboration to your existing or future business. The authors do this deftly through examples that span gold mining to healthcare to social media.